Sunday, June 24, 2012

News without the point

I used to read Le Monde daily, but gave up
owing to their omissions and obliqueness. (I now read Le Figaro
instead.) Again and again, the New York Times would have some
extraordinarily interesting, well-analyzed and clearly-written article about
events or trends in France; at which point I would race to log into
lemonde.fr, but -- nothing. While hundreds of automobiles were
going up in flames in and around Paris, the leading newspaper would have
nothing but mumbling little articles about the minister of this clashing with
the deputy minister of that. Then, when the story wouldn’t go away
and the whole world knew what was going on, Le Monde would publish reaction pieces, tut-tutting about the
aftermath, the way forward, like that.

It concerns a new German proposal for disbursement of Betreuungsgeld (public funds for childcare expenses) to mothers of infants, to allow them to care for the baby at home. The surprising thing was that this issue is supposedly now tearing Germany apart -- more controversial at present than the truly momentous economic dilemma of the Eurozone. But… why?

In today’s American context, with all the anti-government rhetoric, you might suppose that the opposition was to increased government spending, or even to government involvement in private family matters. But that is not it at all. For Germany already has -- apparently uncontroversially -- a huge public program of day-care centers. The new proposal would be smaller scale, and support mothers-and-babies-together-at-home -- not the sort of thing that would spark an outcry, one would think.

But the Med1 reporter was not off; a quick search of German headlines concerned the existence of much foofaraw:

So what is really at stake here? Are there religious motivations underlying the contending factions (as so often now in American politics)? Do the opinions split along a divide of anything that Americans would recognize as Right versus Left? (Such divides are actually quite multi-dimensional in each country, ill-fitted by the metaphor of handedness. Moreover -- and crucially -- that pattern does not transfer from country to country.) What the American reader misses is a glimpse of the background politicomagnetic field along which the ideological axes align and counteralign.

Perhaps, after an hour or so of seeking and clicking and wading through reams of German text, you might get an idea. Simpler to wait in see if the New York Times reports it (or even better The New Yorker): they will get right to the point.

(If one of our German readers would like to interpret the tea-leaves for us … Bitte “comments” klicken!)

Now, that’s pretty much par for the course in that part of the world, -- indeed it was surpising to see it picked up on the homepage of a minor U.S. paper that usually sticks to strictly local news -- and I’d have quickly surfed on, but that one detail stood out: The article said absolutely nothing about what the rally was about. The demonstrators were described only as “social activists”.

Intrigued, I googled up some articles from more specialized sources, anticipating the real deal:

But no such luck: the first was mum on the rationale, calling the events only “unprecedented socioeconomic riots”. The latter was even less informative: “a social protest”. And even the Israeli newspaper-of-record, Haaretz, managed to publish a long article, with no allusion to what was going on or why, mentioning only “activists”.

The first thing that sprang to mind was something related to the recent violaent expressions of backlash among Israeli citizens against illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. These have been so envenomed, so politically incorrect, that it is awkward even to allude to them stateside, in a family newspaper. And yet they did get reported, albeity gingerly.

Also odd was that the photo showed whites, but the description didn’t fit the usual profile:

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says police made the arrests to prevent looting. He estimated there were 1,500 demonstrators in the protests, though media reports gave a number four times higher.

So what is going on? If you search Google news on “Tel Aviv”, one of the completions is “Tel Aviv race riots”, but that refers to earlier incidents. In the new account of the latest dust-up, the code-words didn’t seem right for camouflaging a race riot.

So, are they hiding something? Something about sexual issues, say, or religious? The latter seemed more likely, since there is a gaping divide within Israeli society along Haredim/non-Haredim lines, in ways quite unimaginable to Americans: it is as though much of our national and foreign policy were being decided by the Amish.

You learn to read between the lines when faced with a modern mum’s-the-word news source -- and to quickly jump to the Readers Comments to get some idea of what is really at stake. The Comments will of course be full of tendentious exaggeration and misinformation -- but at least you will learn what the story is really about.

Unfortunately, none of the articles above allowed Comments, or only a couple of completely oblique ones.

the latest sign of a nationwide protest movement demanding social reforms and affordable housing.

People at the rally said they were angered after a protest leader said she had been injured while being taken into custody at a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Friday.

Thus, pretty innocuous in terms of what, to an American reader, would seem hot-button issues. Apparently the event was not single-issue, but more in line with the multi-issue, broad-brush “Occupy” protests. The clued-in intralinear reader could have guessed this from the articles’ allusion to the presence of a “tent” at the protest -- a symbol of Occupy and of Israeli housing issues.

~

For earlier posts on oddly contentless stories in major news outlets, click here:

A note for those who imagine that this is a straightforward story: not so; il y a des remous en-dessous. Thus, Gedankenexperiment: Suppose that the portly one had been a man. There would have been nothing like the outpouring of sympathy (not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions -- she need never ride the bus another day in here life). If anything, he might have been further mocked, for failing to do his job, which was to keep order on the bus.

If you want a real hero -- or rather, a heroine -- take rather the case of a municipal bus in Springfield, Massachusetts, which I was riding many years ago, when some foul-mouthed youths (much more profane than those in the grandma story), from the same demographic, began cussing: the woman driving the bus simply … came to a complete stop, put the thing in neutral, and turned around:

“You don’t talk that way in front of your mothers, and you don’t talk that way in front of me.”

They shut up.

Now -- that’s the spirit, folks; not the cowering and whimpering that is being wept over and fawned over now. Thus, what seemed superficially to be a straightforward tale of discourtesy trumped by sympathy (and there is that aspect, of course), with a fairy-tale happy-ending (and thus it was likewise framed in the French-language radio-essay, whose title means “Grandma Cinderella”) is, on a more benthic level, an extension of the Jessica Lynch syndrome: celebrating victimhood over valor.

(Note: Neither Ms. Lynch nor Ms. Klein are in the least responsible for the cults that were erected upon their accidental notoriety. They neither sought, nor relished, such a role.)

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About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.